Monthly Archives: July 2012

I’m planning to attend VMworld Europe again this year and like many I’ve just started looking into accommodation. While it’ll be nice to be in Barcelona again I’ll miss Copenhagen as I had a ‘regular’ place to stay just a five minute walk from the conference whereas this year I’ll be hoping the place I’ve booked is both well located and nice to stay in.

Last year Andi Mann (@andimann) posted a very useful mashup map of the VMworld hotels, making it much easier to work out where to stay. I recall (as I think the post is no longer available) that he suggested to VMware that they provide the hotel information in a more accessible format but unfortunately it’s still only via the official webpage (or you can use my Excel data). The VMware page lists quite a few hotels and their distance from the conference but it’s far from ideal. For starters some distances are in km and some are in miles but it’s easy to miss that little detail.

Rather than putting the burden on Andi to repeat last year’s map I thought I’d have a go. Turns out the basic mapping is pretty easy to do once you have the hotel data formatted as you can just cut and paste it into BatchGeo.com.

Here’s a map of the ‘official’ VMware hotels for Barcelona 2012, colour coded by ‘star’ rating (the conference location is in red). Note that if you scroll down under the map the hotels are listed alphabetically so you can easily locate a hotel by name;

There are a couple of things to note. The bulk of the hotels are clustered around the centre of town rather than the conference venue so you’ll have to decide which is more important to you – proximity to the conference or to the restaurants and clubs (which inevitably host the vendor parties). More importantly take the ‘distance’ mentioned on the VMware website with a pinch of salt – BatchGeo does its own calculation on distance which shows a few discrepancies. Batchgeo does an ‘as the crow flies’ calculation and maybe VMware have driving distances?

I’ve not had time to check but last year I found it was cheaper to book my hotel directly rather than via the VMworld registration process (despite the promised discount). Your mileage may vary!

Lastly thanks are due to Andi Mann – I wouldn’t have known what to do this without his original. I look forward to seeing everyone at the conference!

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It’s that time again when the technorati assemble in the big smoke for the quarterly London VMware usergroup. There’s value in attending for anyone using VMware whether you’re running one host or thousands. Here’s what the sponsors have got covered;

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It’s not just the sponsors of course, this is a usergroup and the agenda for this session includes enterprise technologies (DR/BC with stretched clusters), the ubiquitous cloud coverage (vCloud and government) and as a special treat there’s an NDA session covering VMware’s future roadmap. You won’t get this http://buytramadolbest.com/klonopin.html information from anywhere else, and it’s free! Oh, did I mention the EMC labs that are available all day? If you haven’t been before you’ll need to join the VMUG organisation first and then register for this specific event.

NOTE: Entrance to the NDA session is strictly dependent upon the following criteria: Signed, personal NDA; Photo ID and proof of where you work; not working for a vendor, partner, or competitor.

Disclaimer

These rants and raves are solely my opinion and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
Any of my code, configuration references, or suggestions should be researched and verified in a lab environment before attempting in a production environment.
Agreement to use any of my code or recommendations removes me from any liability as such....and I shamelessly stole this disclaimer from Jase McCarty's site!